Viewing the world through a different lens

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I am repeating a post from four years ago here, just updated the numbers, so some of you might know this already. Well, New Year does not really repeat itself, but we pretend it does… The year is an as-if-construction. We pretend that at this time, one period is ending and a new one is … Continue reading →

“Truth and reality in art begin at the point where the artist ceases to understand what he is doing and capable of doing …” Henri Matisse What Matisse is talking about here may be a general feature of creative processes. While they are going on, we don’t understand completely what we are doing. In the … Continue reading →

Part 2 of a small series on some aspects of the history of ideas about the relationship of body and soul, or matter and mind. Part 1 is here. At the time of Plato, the practice of sacrifice is still there, but the concepts of death and life seem to have changed. According to Plato, … Continue reading →

Imagine you are sitting down near an old tomb among Roman ruins, perhaps at the Via Appia, to take a rest during a hot summer day. You look at the inscriptions on the graves. They start talking to you: Shadow of dead Roman: If you cover the way’s distance here, rest a little bit. Why … Continue reading →

I suggest that reality, and especially human cognition and the culture created by it, is a proteon. A proteon, by definition, is an entity for which a complete and exact description is not possible. If human thought, science and culture is a proteon, there cannot be a single systematic and logical basis of all human … Continue reading →

Knowledge arises from our interaction with reality (including ourselves and our previous knowledge). Reality is a proteon, i.e. it cannot be described completely. So at any given time, our knowledge is incomplete. There are gaps in it, there are inconsistencies, there are errors and artefacts, there is vagueness, and there are different degrees of justification. … Continue reading →

The world we inhabit cannot be described completely. It is a proteon. And each of us has a small, partially private section of it, a part that we call our life. Interacting with the world, each of us can only, in our lifetime, build up a limited amount of knowledge about it. Some of … Continue reading →